ASUN senate signs off on new budget

The Associated Students of the University of Nevada senate gave the OK last Wednesday to a brand new budget for a brand new fiscal year. ASUN is the steward of an estimated $3 million garnered from student fees and profit from the Nevada Wolf Shop, itself owned and operated by ASUN.

Those millions are spread out across dozens of different departments, programs and staffers, funding everything from the Campus Escort service to concerts and events. Though the senate had a few questions here and there and a few clerical errors to fix, the budget passed through the senate chambers with relative ease. What questions the senate did have, however, pertained to a sizable increase in the programming budget.

The Department of Programming, in charge of everything from concerts to the various spirit weeks on campus, is receiving an additional $13,000 in the quest for bigger headliners at this fall’s Biggest Little Festival. The department is also receiving another $5,000 to be used for food at events, in addition to an extra $5,000 for ASUN’s premier-level sponsorship of TEDxUniversityofNevada, on top of the $10,000 it had already been giving TEDx.

There were also some large shifts in the amount of money set aside for the ASUN Center for Student Engagement’s professional staff. Three graduate assistant positions are being changed to full-time professional positions, amounting to a $30,000 net increase in salaries.

ASUN senators, who are paid based on the cost of credits, received a raise since the price of tuition is still slowly climbing. More funds were also allocated for a new 22nd senator, added after a ballot measure last session.

All this is purely temporary, as the budget will have to change two more times before the fall semester — once in June, when the leftover monies from the current fiscal year roll over, and again in August when extra revenue from student fees, itself buoyed by increasing admissions, starts to come in.

It’s at that point that ASUN expects to release what it calls the “simplified budget,” a series of pie charts that clearly break down what ASUN money goes where. As things stand now, the budget can only be viewed in spreadsheet form and the spreadsheet, being fairly dense, is not the most user-friendly document.

President Brandon Boone and budget and finance chair Sen. Kyle Feng, College of Science, hope this changes with the new simplified budget.

That simplified budget is expected to be released sometime this fall.

The news desk can be reached at jsolis@sagebrush.unr.edu and on Twitter @TheSagebrush.